Bridget Jones’s Mirror
THE DIARY 17
Bridget Jones | Illustration by Manuel Santelices
I just read a column by Elizabeth Egan in The New York Times about the 25th anniversary of the publishing of Bridget Jones's Diary in the United States. The novel, written by the British author Helen Fielding, became a huge commercial success at the time and created a cultural tsunami for many single women around the world who felt an instant connection with Bridget, a 30 something editorial assistant living in London, ambitious, romantic and insecure, with a dangerous weakness for cigarettes, vodka and her handsome boss.
July 1998 cover of Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding via Amazon
“Bridget Jones Deserved Better. We All Did.”
By Elisabeth Egan, The New York Times, ESSAY, June 30, 2023
Egan is right in that “today, her nuttiness and self-loathing read like a relic from another time.” It was another time! It was pre #MeToo, pre Black Lives Matter, pre End-of-Roe, and way before this new era of confidently bold self-affirmation. From the first lines of the book, it is clear that Bridget considers herself fat. So, she starts to count calories. She wouldn’t dream to be happily plump or demand acceptance because, simply put, that’s who she is. Same thing about her affair with her boss, a charming bastard, brilliantly played by Hugh Grant in the movie version of the book, who sends emails commenting on the length of her skirt or how tight is her sweater. A millennial would react like a vengeful Uma Thurman in Kill Bill, but Bridget thought the whole thing was cute and sexy, or at least convinced herself of this truth. And so did I.
It was, as I said, another time.
Renée Zellweger as Bridget Jones in the film: Bridget Jones 2, The Edge for Reason, Via PluggedIn
I kept a copy of Bridget Jones’s Diary in my night table for over a decade. Every time I felt sad or depressed or down, I would open a page, any page, and find solace and even happiness. I felt a kinship with this fictional character I have hardly ever felt with any other person, fictional or otherwise. We understood each other. We liked each other.
The New York Times story made me think about representation in culture, particularly pop culture and every multicultural dimension. These days people call to be seen and heard on screens big and small. They want their stories to be reflected in Hollywood stories, in magazines and in fashion. People of color. People with disabilities. LGBTQ people. People who hate labels. All kinds of people. Representation matters.
Growing up as a gay kid in Santiago, Chile, in the 70’s, I don’t remember ever seeing a movie star in the cinema and thinking, hey, that’s me! Not that I ever want to, either. I was always more of a romantic consumer of new, fabulous, worldly, sophisticated and different. I was always curious to see people different than me: more beautiful, more interesting, better dressed, and, hopefully, living far from Santiago, maybe in New York or London.
“Sheila Levine is dead and living in New York” book cover via Amazon
In school we read plenty of books about the Latin American struggles; stories of farmers or miners or seamen dealing with a life full of hardship and disappointment. I did not see myself or my life reflected in any of those books either. But then, one day, I found a book in a little bookstore in the downtown area of Santiago and the title immediately caught my attention: Sheila Levine is dead and living in New York.
Written by Gail Parent in 1972, the book tells the story of Sheila, a curvaceous Jewish girl living in Manhattan who dreams of becoming an actress and, more important, a flat chested wife before she turns 30. When neither of those things happen, she decides to kill herself.
Bridget Jones's Diary writer Helen Fielding, second left, with actors Colin Firth, Renée Zellweger and Hugh Grant at the time of the film adaptation's launch in 2001 via The Irish News: Is Bridget Jones Still Relevant 25 Years On?
I read the book when I was 16 and from everything I had read until then it was the one that had the deepest impact on me. This woman and her crushed illusions – in a constant fight against her own body, permanently knocking herself on the hardest corners of reality, dreaming of unavailable men, thinking of dramatically being saved after she decides to end it all – felt so familiar to me, so close to who I was at the time. She was not a shy boy with freckles and straight dark hair living in a city at the end of the world, but looking at her it was like looking at a mirror.
I felt the same years later, at age 37 when living in NYC, with Bridget. But I have not felt anything close to that with, say, Pedro Pascal, who, like me, is a middle aged Chilean man living in New York. We are just too different. I believe real representation has to do much more with feelings – how one self-identifies and relates to another’s raw human experiences – than looks or how things appear on the surface. Don’t get me wrong, I like Pedro Pascal and I admire his talent and personal journey. (you can read more about this right here.) But this is different than seeing yourself through another’s shared viewpoints – it simply is visceral.
It’s not obvious. It’s not one-size-fits-all. And when you are least expecting it, if you remain open to receive, you can find it in the most unexpected mirrors.
